If Anything, America’s Defense Budget Is Too Small

Our adversaries fight us everywhere from cyberspace to outer space. We aren’t winning.

By JON KYL and ROGER ZAKHEIM

January 15, 2019

Jon Kyl is a former member of the U.S. Senate from Arizona. Roger Zakheim is director of the Ronald Reagan Institute and a former general counsel on the House Armed Services Committee. They both were commissioners on the National Defense Strategy Commission.

As the Trump administration selects Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’ successor and Congress deliberates over the president’s choice, we encourage the nominee to address whether he or she agrees with the findings of a dozen national security experts who recently declared that America’s military power is eroding and concluded that our national security is in a “crisis,” even going so far as to say we’re in a state of “emergency.” Bluster or bull’s-eye? The view of the next secretary of Defense on this question will tell us everything we need to know about what we can expect next from the Pentagon.

The essence of the crisis we and the other commissioners identified in the report of the National Defense Strategy Commission goes to a seemingly innocuous objective in the strategy: The U.S. will remain the “preeminent military power in the world.” This was a subtle but profound admission that something previously seen as a matter of course is now very much at risk.

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Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military has been the uncontested superpower ensuring security and stability globally, but most notably in three regions of the world: Europe, Asia and the Middle East. This is now contested space. The contest is happening every day from cyberspace to outer space, from Ukraine to the South China Sea. And we’re not winning.

While we may be able to prevail in one conflict, we’re no longer confident we can deter a second. Can you be pre-eminent without doing both? Our view is that a force capable of winning in only one region of the world will invite aggression in another, relegating itself to a regional — not global — military power.

How did this happen? First, while the U.S. military has been preoccupied with counterterrorism and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, other countries, notably Russia and China, have invested in new technologies, capabilities and operational concepts that exploit our weaknesses and level the playing field in 21st-century warfare. As we note, our adversaries “are blending nuclear, space, cyber, conventional, and unconventional means in their war-fighting doctrines and pursuing coercive aims through a mix of military and non-military means.” Simply put: Winning is no longer a foregone conclusion and even if we prevail, it will come at a very high price.

Second, we underinvested in readiness, failed to modernize our nuclear and conventional forces and were slow to adjust to the latest revolution in military technology. Great sums were spent on low-end conflict in the Middle East, while we lost sight of the high-end fight brewing elsewhere. We rightfully invested in technology to counter IEDs — the low-end improvised explosive devices used by insurgents — and became tactical masters at refining the kill-chain for counterterrorism operations, but this came at a cost. We have a generation of war fighters that is ill-equipped and untrained for a conventional fight with “great powers.”

The National Defense Strategy doesn’t choose between prevailing against a great power, deterring rogue states like Iran or North Korea or defeating ISIS. That’s not a choice a superpower makes. Rightfully, in our view, the president’s strategy tasks the military with doing it all, but for a decade we’ve asked our military to do it all with less. This cannot continue.

This gets to the third cause of how we arrived at this moment: We’ve done it to ourselves by inane budget cuts like sequestration and budget caps, as well as the perennial financial mismanagement caused by continuing resolutions. We believe current funding is inadequate to realize the military’s objectives – with the president’s announced intent to cut the defense budget by 5 percent, he would effectively be hollowing out his own strategy. Unless the Pentagon alters the expectations of the strategy and America’s global strategic objectives, the military will need 3 to 5 percent real growth annually. Even with this level of investment, it will take a decade or more to get there.

Which gets us to the time factor. Our adversaries are moving fast. They are contesting and chipping away at the balance of power daily. We cannot afford to dither or debate. We need to execute. The National Defense Strategy has rightfully reoriented the direction and priorities of our military, but now it’s time to execute.

There are those who will say strategy is about making choices and we are at a moment of choosing. We should choose one region over another or choose a certain set of capabilities and jettison some capacity. We’ve explored those arguments over the past year and evaluated those choices. Each one leads to the same conclusion: it invites conflict, cedes ground to our adversaries and ultimately threatens our security and prosperity. This is a choice we think our country should not have to make. We should know if the next secretary of Defense agrees.